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Joe Soucheray: 'Football' stadium not worth our money

By Joe Soucheray

Posted:
05/15/2011 12:01:00 AM CDT

Updated:
05/16/2011 09:35:39 AM CDT

Minnesota Vikings team owner Zygi, right, visits with Ramsey county commissioner Tony Bennett Tuesday, May 10, 2011 in Arden Hills, Minn.,at the site of a proposed $1.1 billion retractable-roof football stadium on the grounds of the old Army ammunitions plant in Arden Hills. (Pioneer Press: Scott Takushi)

There's a problem with the public funding such a significant portion of a new football stadium, ideologically at the very least, that might have become more evident with the artist's renderings of the new place out at the site of the old bullet-manufacturing plant in Arden Hills.

Does it look like a football stadium?

No. It looks sybaritic, a Thunderdome for Acid Queens and bloodied gladiators. Football is well on its way to becoming something that is not football as we have known it, when our fellows strapped on their cardboard helmets and went toe-to-toe with the meatpackers and sausage salesmen from Green Bay or Chicago.

The game is morphing into a quasi sport/reality TV show. It is only a matter of time before the games will be choreographed with preordained winners and losers. Subplots will feature the romantic contretemps featuring our wide receiver and their quarterback, with the femme fatale, probably one of the always-available Kardashian sisters, dressed provocatively and seated strategically, just where the crew in the camera truck will know where to find her to capture her theatrical angst and concern, not to mention her incredible cleavage.

This will have to happen to prevent death.

The players are too big, too fast, too, in many cases, without moral conscience to be trusted not to kill each other. It is already the least charming of all our games and it is going down the road of becoming tragically bleak and demeaning.

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It is already too dangerous. Concussions are rampant. Brett Favre's last play of his career was getting his head slammed to the frozen fake turf at TCF Bank Stadium. You can't tell me that Aaron Rodgers didn't get a concussion in the playoff game at Chicago. I can still see Tommy Kramer twitching in a seizure at Metropolitan Stadium, and that was when it was still football. That was back in the 1970s.

Well, personally, I don't want to pay for that. Put another way, I don't want to be party to it. Our culture is in enough trouble. I don't mean to sound unnecessarily virtuous or to insist that athletic danger should be avoided. Hockey is dangerous. The status of the game's future, the game's franchise player, Sidney Crosby, is unknown because of a concussion. Basketball can be dangerous. The way the Twins have been going to the trainer's room, you would think that baseball has become the equivalent of jumping out of airplanes without a parachute, so routinely are our boys pulling up lame.

Football is different. The whole intent of the game is to out-chest-thump your opponent, to gloat and preen while the unwashed Greek chorus in their Zubaz and painted faces cheer this madness with a rage that is eerily foreboding.

As long ago as 2003, Joe Horn of the New Orleans Saints and his teammate, Michael Lewis, conspired to have Horn make a cellphone call from the end zone after he scored the second of four touchdowns against the Giants. Earlier that season, after scoring a touchdown against Atlanta, Horn brandished an imaginary machine gun and shot two teammates who dutifully fell to the turf. Terrell Owens and Chad Ochocinco have seen it coming, too, this absolutely vital sea change to take the game into the realm of professional wrestling meets "Jersey Shore.''

They have to. If they don't, they are doing to die.

I know this is a terribly dispiriting assessment of America's favorite sport. Baseball might be America's pastime but football is America's favorite sport, but sport in the bloodletting and ruinous-harm sense of the word.

I have always had a solution, well, as to who should pay anyway. Television networks should build football stadiums. They control the game, they hunger for the bloodiness that has resulted in such boffo ratings. These stadiums are soundstages.

And I can't think of a more fitting place for Fox or CBS to build the newest of the coliseums than an abandoned ammunition plant.

Joe Soucheray can be reached at jsoucheray@pioneerpress.com or 651-228-5474. Soucheray is heard from 3 to 6 p.m. weekdays on KSTP-AM 1500.